ABOUT

A barber needs a license.
Your building manager
does not.

CondosCoopsNYC is the forensic database of every documentable failure in New York City's condo and co-op governance ecosystem, built from public records because the state refuses to build it themselves.

THE PROBLEM

A $100 billion industry with zero oversight.

In New York State, a barber needs a license. A nail technician needs a license. A home inspector needs a license. The person managing a $200 million residential building with a $15 million annual budget and fiduciary power over hundreds of families needs nothing.

No licensure. No exam. No bond. No continuing education. No disciplinary body. No complaint registry. No public accountability of any kind.

There are over 14,000 condominium and cooperative buildings in New York City, housing more than a million residents. Their managing agents control common charges, capital expenditures, vendor contracts, reserve funds, and building operations. They operate with less regulatory scrutiny than someone who cuts hair.

This is not an oversight. It is a moat. Someone built it. Someone maintains it. And someone profits from every day it stands.

WHAT WE BUILT

The infrastructure the state refused to create.

The Managing Agent Registry. New York has no public registry of managing agents. We reverse-engineered one from HPD registration data, DOB filings, AG offering plans, and ACRIS records. 15 firms. 4,447 buildings. Exposed.
The Accountability Scorecard. We scored every major managing agent on Class C violations (immediately hazardous conditions) from HPD — the violations that mean someone's health or safety is at risk right now. Not self-reported surveys. Public enforcement data.
100+ Regulatory Gaps. We documented over 100 specific regulatory gaps, governance defects, and extraction patterns in NYC condo and co-op law. Each entry includes primary sources, severity ratings, affected population estimates, and proposed legislative fixes.
Building-Level Reports. Individual profiles for NYC condo and co-op buildings, aggregating HPD violations, DOB permits, 311 complaints, and governance data into a single searchable record. The due-diligence tool the city should provide to every buyer.
The Complaint Mechanism. The Department of State has no formal complaint process for managing agent misconduct. We built one. Every complaint is documented, sourced, and tracked.

THE DATA

Public records. Primary sources. No exceptions.

Every data point on this site comes from a verifiable public source. We do not accept anonymous tips. We do not publish unverifiable claims. We do not editorialize data. Every building report, every agent score, every regulatory gap links directly to the primary source record.

HPD Violations, complaints, registrations
DOB / BIS Permits, LL11 filings, certificates of occupancy
ACRIS Deeds, mortgages, offering plans, UCC filings
DOF Tax assessments, liens, STAR exemptions
311 Noise, heat/hot water, elevator, pest complaints
NYSCEF Litigation records, filings, court decisions
AG / REFB Offering plans, amendments, CPS filings
NYC Open Data Building permits, ECB violations, DOB NOW

BBL (Borough-Block-Lot) is the universal join key. Every record traces back to a specific building, a specific source URL, and a specific scrape date. When a field is unknown, it's NULL — never invented.

THE PATTERNS

What the data reveals.

Across thousands of buildings and millions of records, the same extraction patterns appear again and again. These are not isolated incidents. They are business models.

No-bid vendor contracts awarded by boards to companies connected to managing agents, board members, or their families, shielded from challenge by the business judgment rule.
Undisclosed kickbacks from insurance brokers, contractors, and service providers to managing agents who select them on behalf of the buildings they manage.
Reserve fund absence. No law in New York requires condo or co-op boards to maintain reserves. Buildings operate with zero cushion, then hit owners with $30K-$50K special assessments when systems fail.
Sponsor control abuse. Sponsors retain board control until 50%+1 of units sell. During this period they award contracts to their own companies and set budgets that benefit their unsold inventory.
Financial opacity. No law requires condos to disclose audited financials to prospective buyers. You can buy a $1.5M apartment without seeing the building's balance sheet.
Retaliation against owners who ask questions, request records, or run for the board. The playbook: deny access, manufacture violations, weaponize legal fees funded by common charges.

EDITORIAL STANDARDS

How we report.

Public data first. Every claim links to a primary source. No anonymous tips. No unverifiable assertions. If we can't source it, we don't publish it.
Right of reply. Every entity we name gets the opportunity to respond before publication. Responses are published verbatim.
No advertising. No sponsors. No conflicts. No revenue from any entity we cover. No managing agent ads. No broker partnerships. The moment we take their money, we become them.
Open corrections. When we're wrong, we say so publicly, permanently, and without delay.
Entities, not individuals. We focus on managing agents, sponsor LLCs, law firms, and patterns — not individual unit owners or small-time board members, unless a court has made a finding.
Fair use. Article excerpts are transformative commentary — criticism, analysis, aggregation — with links to originals. We never mirror full articles.

WHO WE ARE

A project of TASFGA.

CondosCoopsNYC is the in-field reporting arm of The American Society for Governance Accountability (TASFGA) — an independent, nonpartisan public-interest organization dedicated to governance transparency and reform across sectors.

TASFGA provides the institutional framework: the accountability loop (identify, propose, verify), the research methodology, the standards and credentialing work. CondosCoopsNYC provides the receipts: the data, the building reports, the agent scores, the regulatory gap documentation.

To understand why this project exists, the philosophy, thesis, and Dignity Standard that drives our work, read the TASFGA manifesto.

To see the evidence, you're already in the right place.

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